the night table as he got into bed. Katie wasn’t back from seeing Roger, if that’s who she was seeing.
Whenever Danny closed his eyes, the bedroom began to spin. He fell asleep with his eyes open-or he imagined that he did, because his eyes were open, and they felt very dry, when he was awakened in the morning by a man shouting.
“There’s a baby in the road!” some idiot was yelling.
Danny could smell the marijuana; he must have been half asleep, or only half awake, because he imagined that the shouting man was stoned. But the smell of the pot was beside Danny, on the nearest pillow. Katie was sleeping naked there, the covers thrown off and her hair redolent of marijuana. (It was Danny’s impression that Roger smoked dope all the time.)
“Whose baby is this?” the man was shouting. “This baby’s gotta belong to
Maniacal shouting would occasionally reach them from the noisy sorority house farther west on Iowa Avenue, or from the downtown area, but not during what amounted to the morning rush hour.
“Baby in the road!” the maniac kept repeating. It was cold in the bedroom, too, Danny only now realized; he’d passed out with the windows open, and whenever Katie had come home, she’d not bothered to close them.
“It’s not our fucking baby,” Katie said; her voice was slurred, or she spoke into her pillow. “Our baby’s in bed with us, fuckhead!”
“He
“Well, he
Danny had already headed down the hall. He saw that Joe’s bed was empty, with the rails in the lowered position; Katie was so short, she could never lift the boy out of his bed without first lowering the rails.
The traffic was backed up on Iowa Avenue -all the way east, to the bend on Muscatine -as if there’d been an accident in the avenue, directly in front of Danny’s ground-floor apartment. Danny ran out the front door of the duplex in his boxer shorts. Given his state of undress, the writer must have struck the driver of the dirty-white van, which was blocking the incoming traffic to town, as a likely candidate for the neglectful parent.
“Is this
Now a woman from the car that was stopped behind the white van ran into the median and scooped the baby into her arms. “Is
“He’s mine-I was asleep,” Danny told them. He crossed the pavement into the median strip, but the woman- middle-aged, glasses, a pearl necklace (Danny would remember nothing more definitive about her)-seemed reluctant to give the baby up.
“Your baby was in the street, pal-I almost ran over him,” the van driver told Danny. “The fucking diaper, its whiteness, just caught my eye.”
“It doesn’t appear that you were looking for this baby, or that you even knew he was missing,” the woman said to Danny.
“Daddy,” Joe said, holding out his arms.
“Does this child have a mother?” the woman wanted to know.
“She’s asleep-we were both asleep,” Danny told her. He took little Joe from the woman’s tentatively outstretched arms. “Thank you,” Danny said to the van driver.
“You’re still wasted, man,” the driver told him. “Is your wife wasted, too?”
“Thank you,” Danny told him again.
“You should be reported,” the woman said to him.
“Yes, I should be,” Danny told her, “but please don’t.”
Now cars were honking their horns, and Joe started to cry again. “I couldn’t see the sky from the house,” the boy was sobbing.
“You couldn’t see the sky?” his dad asked. They crossed the pavement to the sidewalk, and went into the house to the continuous honking of horns.
“I couldn’t see if Lady Sky was coming down,” Joe said.
“You were looking for Lady Sky?” his father asked.
“I couldn’t see her. Maybe she was looking for me,” the boy said.
The divided avenue was wide; from the middle of the road, or from the median strip, Danny realized that his two-year-old had been able to see the sky. The boy had been hoping that Lady Sky would descend again-that was all there was to it.
“Mommy’s home,” Joe told his dad, as they came into the apartment, which the two-year-old called the
“Yes, I know Mommy’s home,” Danny said. He could see that Katie had fallen back to sleep. On the kitchen table, the writer also noticed that the rum bottle was empty. Had he finished it before going to bed, or had Katie downed what was left in the bottle when she’d come home? (It was probably
He took Joe into the boy’s room and changed his diaper. He had trouble looking at his son’s eyes-imagining them open and staring, unseeing, as the two-year-old in his bright-white diaper lay dead in the road.
“AND THEN YOU stopped drinking, right?” young Joe asked his father. For the duration of the long story, they’d kept their backs to the house they had lived in with Katie.
“The last of that rum was the end of it,” Danny said to the eight-year-old.
“But Mom didn’t stop drinking, did she?” Joe asked his dad.
“Your mom couldn’t stop, sweetie-she probably still hasn’t stopped,” Danny told him.
“And I
“No, you’re not grounded-you can go anywhere you want, on foot or on the bus. It’s your
Joe looked up at the brilliant blue of the fall sky. No descending angel was going to get him out of this predicament. “You never thought Lady Sky was an angel, did you?” the boy asked his dad.
“I believed her when she said she was an angel
The writer would drive all over Iowa City looking for the blue Mustang, but he wouldn’t find it. The police would never spot the rogue car, either. But, back on Iowa Avenue, all Danny did was put his arm around the eight-year- old’s shoulders. “Think of it this way,” he said to his son. “That blue Mustang is still looking for you. Six years ago, when you stood in this street-with nothing but a diaper on-maybe the blue Mustang was stuck in traffic. It might have been several cars behind the white van; that blue Mustang might have been trying to get you even then.”
“It’s not really looking for me, is it?” Joe asked.
“You better believe it is,” his dad told him. “The blue Mustang
“Okay,” the eight-year-old told his father.
“Do you know any two-year-olds?” Danny asked his son.
“No,” the boy answered, “not that I can think of.”
“Well, it would be good for you to meet one,” his dad said, “just so you can see what you looked like in the road.”
That was when the cook drove down Iowa Avenue, in the incoming lane, and pulled over to the curb, where the father and son were standing. “Get in, you two,” Tony Angel told them. “I’ll drop Joe at school, then I’ll take you